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Lycabettus hill photo, Lycabettus theatre, Athens, hill
AR Game
on Lycabettus Hill
diploma project 2017

Architecture & Game Design

My architecture diploma project presented at National Technical University of Athens in October '17.

snakes and ladders game, arts and crafts

My personal interest in game level design was the main motive for choosing the subject of my diploma project. The aim was to examine how game theory could be a potential starting point for designing  architectural space.

 

Therefore, the instant challenge was to combine daily life’s material world experiences with the experience of gaming.

 

Inspired by the worldwide well-known board game “snakes and ladders”, I designed an augmented reality game that could be played on Lycabettus Hill in Athens.

 

Having a set of things in mind such as basic game design rules, a personal analysis of the characteristics of the hill and HoloLens capabilities I designed the game equally in physical and augmented space.

For this project, I will describe my design process broken down in 8 distinct steps.

STEP 1. Define the Problem 

The characteristics of the hill make it hard for most people to wander around, thus there are a lot of unknown spots to explore. No motivation or interest for most people to visit many parts of this magnificent hill. [not a user-friendly space]

Lycabettus hill map, analysis, research, topography

pathway network

slope ratio

STEP 2. Data Analysis: Location

Having lived for many years in Athens, I wanted to design a game in which the players would be able to explore the secrets of their own city.

Walking, Observing, recording

I spent a rather big amount of time on collecting any data I could in order to get the big picture of what I was dealing with.

Data related to the density of the woods, the intense topography, the rocky slopes and the chaotic network of hardly accessed pathways.

Analysis and visualisation

These data were actually the source of my inspiration for the design of a location-specific game.

STEP 3. Define Gameplay 
snakes-and-ladders-01-01-01.png
snakes-and-ladderssd-01-01.png

“Snakes and Ladders” is a famous board game with simple rules which can be played again and again. A deeper study of its core gameplay by de-constructing its basic elements helped me to create the rules of a game which could be played in a 3d dimensional physical space.

Level design is the thoughtful execution of gameplay into gamespace for players to dwell in

Christopher W. Totten

Snakes and ladders, AR Game, Lycabettus hill, Athens, game rules, brochure
STEP 4. Define Gamespace

Defining the:

  • game-space 

  • starting point vs finishing point

  • main route/path based on previous analysis

  • balance between the number of “snakes” and the one of “ladders” as well as their positioning 

STEP 5. The rules of the game

Creating the rules of a game is not that simple. The game should have simple rules which would not create any misconceptions. The players should be able to start playing the game and intuitively find their way around the space. 

Both material and AR game elements guide players through game-space.

Material, AR Design system, Typology, Game design, game elements
STEP 6. Design System

In order to design a user-friendly (both material and augmented) space for the game I created simple and repetitive types of material and AR morpholog.


All elements of the game are patterned in a way that makes them recognizable when come across.

STEP 7. AR Visualised

The visualisation of the augmented space was very important in order to understand how the player would experience the game.

 

For this reason, I created images and animated gifs showing space from a player's perspective. 

Last but not least, the most useful design tool I used for this project was Unity Engine. I decided to do a case study on a specific part of the game map and simulate a player's walk-through.

Designing the experience of space through a "first person's" view was vital.

 

So, I used the "first person" feature to create the augmented reality elements' animations and the way they affected player’s view. 

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